


Bluebells

by avislightwing



Series: Jester's Second First Kisses [3]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Autistic Yasha, Comfort, F/F, Flowers, Fluff, Loss, Love Languages, Mutual Pining, Purple Prose, Women Loving Women, happy lesbian day have some lesbians, this is... the softest thing I've ever written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-04 18:27:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18610072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avislightwing/pseuds/avislightwing
Summary: Jester's been thinking about love and what it means. She comes to Yasha for answers.





	Bluebells

**Author's Note:**

> Playlist for this fic (and this ship in general) found here: https://open.spotify.com/user/elsu0654/playlist/6q4urfbXDmWt0TFpcCZWqN?si=XG5kkAZbTH6Zr4TDiB1a9A
> 
> (Fire Under Water is about Jester, you can't change my mind)

“Yasha?”

Yasha was sitting against a tree, cleaning the Magician’s Judge, running a bit of cloth over the flat of the blade and wiping the dust and dirt from the engraved runes that run down its length. “Oh, hallo, Jester,” she said, setting the sword down across her knees. Jester’s little blue face was scrunched with an emotion Yasha couldn’t really identify. Her eyes flicked to Jester’s tail, which was lashing behind her. Anxious, then. Luckily, Jester and Molly had a lot of the same tells, so her experience with him helped her with Jester. She wished everyone had tails. It was so much easier to tell what they were feeling. “Do you need something?”

“I don’t know.” Jester flumped down to the grass, crosslegged facing Yasha. She was wearing the dress from Rosanna today, with panels of dark blue and a design of silver constellations, creamy white lace and the throat and the flowing sleeves and lining the underskirt. Yasha wasn’t sure how Jester had kept the lace clean; maybe it was one of those elusive uses of thaumaturgy. Either way, it suited her, making the dark freckles scattered over her skin stand out like stars. “Maybe.”

For a few minutes, they sat in silence, other than the soft sound of Jester’s tail swishing through the grass. Yasha studied Jester curiously. They hadn’t talked much privately since that night, when Yasha had told her and Caduceus about –

“Zuala,” Jester blurted out, as if she’d read Yasha’s mind. “Um. I want. To know. If you don’t mind, really, I mean, it’s no big deal, but I was just _wondering_ , how did you… know?”  
“Know Zuala?” Yasha asked, puzzled.

“How did you know you – you loved her?” Jester said, squirming like she was sitting on a rock. “Like, how did you know you wanted to be together forever and ever? Was it one time you looked at her and just thought she was sooooo beautiful and thought you wanted to have sex with her and then you lived happily -” She faltered at the last words and looked down at her hands, twisting themselves together like a pair of bluebirds.

Yasha set the Magician’s Judge aside and leaned back against the tree trunk behind her, considering Jester’s question. “There was not a single moment,” she said. “Not like you are thinking. It was not love at first sight, or anything like that. We were friends first. We got closer, and talked more, and one day I just… couldn’t look away.” Yasha remembered that moment clearly: it was nothing special. Yasha had made a joke and Zuala had laughed at it, full-bodied, shoulders shaking and eyes squinted shut, and Yasha had looked, and looked, and looked, like her eyes were starving and Zuala, laughing, was a feast.

In her mind’s eye, then, Zuala’s chestnut-auburn hair and strong chin turned into shades of blue with a snub nose and round cheeks, laughing, laughing.

Yasha turned away from Jester before she couldn’t.

“That sounds really nice,” Jester said, and even Yasha could identify the wistfulness, the soft longing in Jester’s sweet voice. “I didn’t know you could – be friends first, I guess. In all the books there’s no friends, it’s just – they start kissing right away, lots of times.”

“I have found,” Yasha said carefully, “that the best love is built in friendship. Do you know why?”

“Tell me,” Jester said.

“Because you get to know the person,” Yasha said, and as she spoke, she plucked a few small blue flowers from the grass near her knee and twirled them slowly between her fingers. She did not get her book out. “You… know what they’re like. What makes them laugh and cry, what they are scared of. How they feel about you.”

You get to know, she thought, what they believe and what brings them joy. You see them grow, and go from the girl you first met, violet eyes wide with wonder at everything she hadn’t seen, to a girl with eyes wise at everything she’s seen – the beauty and the pain – and how she knows there is so much more to see. You start to notice things about her. You find yourself longing for the sound of her voice when she’s quiet, the touch of her hand when she isn’t nearby.

“I like that,” Jester said. “And if you’re friends first, then you spend a whole bunch of time together _already_ , and then it’s just more special than before, even, because then you’re in love.” Then her face scrunched again, and Yasha thought about how maybe that was her favorite Jester expression, second only to her sunflower smile. “But… how did it feel? When you couldn’t look away?”

Yasha began braiding the delicate stems of the flowers together, carefully. Her hands were more suited for wielding a sword than something like this, but she could gentle them, at times, for certain things. For certain people. “It felt like lots of different things at different times,” she said. “Sometimes it felt like… sunlight. Like when you sit in the sun and it’s warm, and you want to turn your face to it. And sometimes it felt like fire, like it was burning me up, but in a good way.”

Jester hummed thoughtfully, tunelessly. That was thing she and Zuala had in common; neither could sing if they tried, and neither cared. Zuala had made Yasha sing to her sometimes when they were alone, because she couldn’t do so for herself. She always said Yasha had a voice like a songbird, and she herself had a voice like a crow.

 _But a crow with the loveliest plumage_ , Yasha had teased, and Zuala had laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

“Was there anything else you wanted to know, Jester?” Yasha asked.

“No,” Jester said, and then, “Yes.” Her tail was flicking again. “What if… you are in love with someone, maybe, possibly. Someone is in love with someone. And maybe they love you back, but maybe not, and you can’t tell.”

Yasha felt her forehead wrinkle a little, just between her eyes. It was probably about Jester and Fjord, she thought. Or maybe about Jester and Beau. Of course Jester had wanted to hear about her and Zuala.

She is not for you, she thought, and she had thought that every day for a long while now, but once again she thought it deliberately, pouring water over the fire in her heart that she knew would reignite no matter what she did.

“Well,” she said to Jester, who was still leaning in, waiting for a response. “Maybe spend more time with them, and get to know them better. Once you do that, you will be closer with them, and you could ask them, or sometimes then you can tell, because you know how to see what they’re feeling. I – have a hard time with that, actually, but I have heard that it can happen.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” Jester said, and her tail flicked, and then did it again, and again, and Jester caught it up and held it still, and Yasha didn’t know what she was feeling at all. “Okay. I’ll – um, I mean, someone will do that. If they were – in that situation.”

“If you are hoping they like you as well,” Yasha added, “you could even… try to show them how you felt? You could give them gifts, or – offer to do things for them. Spend more time with them, or tell them nice things, or show your – affection physically, holding hands, hugs. There are lots of ways to express love, you know.”

Jester nodded seriously, as if committing the words to memory. “Gifts, and doing things, and spending time, and words, and hugs,” she said. “Thank you, Yasha.”

Yasha smiled, and Jester smiled back, bigger, dimples and freckles and the gap between her front teeth and Yasha knew that every word she’d said to Jester wasn’t enough, because how can you explain that feeling where you look at someone and you would do anything for them? You would do anything to make them smile like that, and laugh like that, forever?

“Of course, Jester,” Yasha said. She looked down at her hands, which were still holding the little flowers. “Here,” she added, and she knew that it was a bad idea, but she handed the flowers to Jester. “They match you.”

Jester looked at Yasha, and her smile gentled, and Yasha thought that maybe it was something like hope, the expression on her face. “Not for your book?” she asked.

“Not these ones,” Yasha said. “I can find others for Zuala. These ones are for you.”

“Thank you,” Jester said again, and leaned in, and Yasha closed her eyes –

\- and Jester’s soft lips brushed across her cheek, gentle, gentle.

“You’re a good friend,” Jester said, and her bluebird hands held the flowers close to her heart as she leaned back and Yasha opened her eyes again. “You’re a really good friend, Yasha.”

“I try to be,” Yasha said.

“You are,” Jester repeated, and laughed, soft, like bells, little silver ones.

“Well, if you have more questions, you can always ask me,” Yasha said.

“I will,” Jester said, and stood up. “Maybe we can talk again soon, okay?”

“Yes,” Yasha said. “I would like that.”

She watched as Jester walked away, towards where Beau was doing push-ups and Fjord was counting them and Caleb was trying to read his book and correcting Fjord’s counting.

And she let that same hope she thought she saw, she wondered whether she saw on Jester’s face, bloom in her own heart, like bluebells.

**Author's Note:**

> s/o to my good friend sam for an angsty d&d line I managed to make fluffy in this fic


End file.
